Salle: Lotte Concert Hall, Seoul

Propulsive Prokofiev from pianist Dmitry Shishkin between Ravel’s hypnotic minimalism and Schoenberg’s late-Romantic complexity. 

Fragmentation to ritual: this was no Rite of Spring of two halves but a single, vast architectural crescendo.

A sumptuous exploration of Saint-Saëns at Lotte Concert Hall in a programme forming a cohesive tapestry woven from the composer’s fascination with colour, all traced back to a distinctly Parisian sensibility. 

Like the grainy intensity of a high-contrast black-and-white photograph, these rugged edges accentuated Mahler’s expressive extremes, reaffirming the conductor’s innate flair for crafting a grand aesthetic narrative within the symphony’s expansive architecture.